NRM will deflate Besigye’s bravado on February 18
What you need to know:
According to Besigye, a three-time presidential loser, public attendance of rallies is testimony to his popularity and electability. Perhaps we need to remind Besigye of the same type of grandiose by former DP president Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere during the 1996 elections. Wherever he would go, especially in Buganda, Ssemogerere claimed it was evidence of his sure win. As we all know, he walked off with a paltry 23.7 per cent.
The Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) presidential candidate, Dr Kizza Besigye, hasn’t ceased to amuse during the on-going election campaigns with his bombastic political bravado.
In this election, the NRM is set to disprove Dr Besigye’s colourful although empty style politics and hopefully dump him for good, and that he won’t this time again cry foul as he has been doing without providing credible evidence of cheating.
Earlier at the start of the campaigns, Besigye sought to portray the exercise as a sham that did not deserve much effort and attention. Now as the campaigns draw to a close, Besigye has made a complete U-turn, giving all the assurances that he will give the NRM presidential candidate Yoweri Museveni a “knockout within the first round.”
While campaigning in Rukungiri, his home district, Besigye was quoted by the media boasting: “I hear some people talking of a re-run, there is no re-run. This time it is going to be a knockout. Wherever I have been, I have seen huge crowds at my campaign rallies.”
These are the exact words and phrases that Besigye used in 2006 election. In 2011, he added colour to his boisterous rhetoric saying he had brought a “political tsunami,’ to sweep Museveni away by year’s end. As everyone knows, instead the tsunami swept Besigye away at the presidential, parliamentary and local government elections. Besigye declined from the 37 per cent in 2006 to only 26 per cent in 2011, and FDC MPs were reduced from 39 to 32 respectively during the same period.
According to Besigye, a three-time presidential loser, public attendance of rallies is testimony to his popularity and electability. Perhaps we need to remind Besigye of the same type of grandiose by former DP president Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere during the 1996 elections. Wherever he would go, especially in Buganda, Ssemogerere claimed it was evidence of his sure win. As we all know, he walked off with a paltry 23.7 per cent.
At the subsequent parliamentary elections, candidates who had supported him in the Inter-Political Forces Cooperation (IPFC) were marginal and got vanquished, which forced many into retirement.
In fact, that was the main junction at which DP was whipped out from the national scene and reduced to the peripheral fiddle it is today.
But it would appear that Besigye’s current boastfulness are informed by two although contradictory developments. One is the empty rhetoric by renegade UPDF Gen David Sejusa that Besigye won the 2006 elections had they (the military and intelligence) not tinkered with results from a dubious tally centre allegedly at Basiima House in Mengo.
For the record, Basiima House was returned to the Buganda Kingdom in 1999 and, therefore, couldn’t have been used by the intelligence services for the purpose Sejusa claims.
Secondly, Sejusa has fed the gullible public, especially Ugandans in the Diaspora, that results were altered from Basiima House although neither him nor Besigye has provided the tally sheets and results declaration forms dully signed by Besigye’s official polling agents to prove their bogus claims. Besigye should be able to tell the world if the declarations forms were also retrieved or grabbed from his agents by NRM ‘hoodlums’, otherwise he should shut up on the claims of cheating.
The other ground for Besigye’s swank talk may be linked to the grand conspiracy against Museveni by various forces that include local fifth columnists and foreign interests, especially from the US and Western Europe that has been cobbling together efforts for “regime change” in Uganda, regardless of what Ugandans will actually say at the ballot boxes.
In our view, Besigye seems to have fallen into this trap and believes that the grand conspiracy can help him attain the presidency by any means possible, the reason he boldly appointed Gen Sejusa, a serving military officer, on to his campaign team in total disregard of the Constitution and established laws of Uganda, as well as common decency.
Many analysts actually believe that Besigye’s newfound animated campaign claims are a desperate effort to raise disputes even when FDC hasn’t fielded candidates in most seats across the country.
Mr Ofwono Opondo speaks for the NRM